Our busy and expanding team is looking to recruit two new posts, a Senior Web Accessibility Consultant as well as a team Administrator. We are also recruiting for a Principle Manager for Digital Accessibility in the Accessibility Group.
Tag: News
Scripting Enabled is an accessibility and social networking hack day scheduled for 19th and 20th of September and tickets just went on sale today. The aim of the conference is to break down the barriers between disabled users and the social web as much as giving ethical hackers real world issues to solve.
Organised by Chris Heilmann from Yahoo! the event is set to be a first and not to be missed. Here’s a break down of what the two days will cover:
On 19th and 20th of September we’ll spend two days kicking off an ongoing research and solutions exercise to remove online accessibility barriers. The event is split into two days with different venues:
On Friday, the 19th of September we’ll meet in the Henry Thomas hall of Metropolitan University in Holloway Road, London to learn from speakers what kind of barriers there are in online offers. Instead of development experts telling us what they think the barriers are this will have speakers that deal with them day by day and cover a range of problems, not just visual impairment.
This event has 150 tickets all in all and will be a discussion/presentation day.
On Saturday, the 20th of September 50 hackers then meet at Gamelab in Shoreditch take the learnings from day one and turn them into alternative interfaces for sites that unnecessarily block out users. We’ll also create blue-print solutions for common problems that will be released open source and documented under Creative Commons.
This event is a hack day and we got space for 50 dedicated hackers.
This looks like a really exciting event so be sure to book your free ticket(s) and see you there.
Tag: News
Everybody loves a good analogy and surprise surprise I’m no different! I want to revisit an issue that I’m sure has been raised numerous times before – the differences between guidelines and user testing and the benefits of each. Now feels like an important time to talk about this again given the imminent release of the next version of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0). At the recent Accessibility 2.0 conference held by AbilityNet, there was also some talk of how useful guidelines actually were compared to user testing, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to put my opinion out there.
So, with all that in mind, let’s talk about food instead!
Chris Mills, who looks after Dev Opera has gathered together the great and the good from the world of the web and developed the first instalment of the Web Standards Curriculum.
The Opera Web Standards Curriculum is an education program to help propagate best practices and increase web standards usage on the web. It provides a thorough grounding in all the skills you need to be a proficient front end developer, including web background theory, in-depth HTML and CSS, design principles and introductory DOM/JavaScript.
This is a fantastic resource aimed at web developers, designers, students, educators; just anyone who wants to learn web design the right way. Whether you’re starting out or simply want to refresh your understanding this is the place to go. Written by experts such as Mark Norman Francis, Jonathan Lane, Linda Goin, Paul Haine, Roger Johansson, Ben Buchanan, Jenifer Hanen, Craig Grannell and Christian Heilmann you can hardly go wrong.
Presented as if you are working on a project from start to finish, the Web Standards Curriculum is broken down into a series of articles taking you from information architecture and wire-framing through to design and build of pages using (X)HTML, CSS and so on. It kicks off with some necessary scene setting describing the origins of the Internet and the Web which in turn provides the backdrop for the rationale of why we need web standards. What’s so great is that while you can opt to read the Curriculum from start to finish you can also just dip into it as it works just as well as modules.
I particularly liked the articles about colour theory, colour schemes and design mock-ups. While I may understand colour from an accessibility point of view this opened up my understanding of how uses of colour can be manipulated to enhance typography, forms, lists, tables and images, all of which are covered in more depth in other articles.
All this lovely goodness doesn’t stop there however. In total there will be fifty plus articles with future additions planned to cover accessibility, CSS and JavaScript. The Web Standards Curriculum will also be maintained to ensure that you get the most up to date information. The best bit however is that it’s for you to use not just as a resource for yourself, but also when teaching others either in schools and colleges or at work.
Opera’s Web Standards Curriculum is also supported by the Web Standards Project (WaSP) who are themselves developing The Curriculum Project. This will be a resource that is intended to be used by those in education, as well as anyone needing to update knowledge on web related technologies.
As Glenda Sims, Senior Systems Analyst University of Texas, and co-lead of WaSP says of Opera’s Web Standards Curriculum says:
Web development and design are ever evolving professions. Anyone teaching these subjects must ask themselves if they are equipping their students with best practices or burdening them with impractical methodologies. All of us in this field can benefit from this resource and use it as a catalyst to further the W3C vision of ‘Web for Everyone. Web on Everything.
Enjoy, share, teach and be part of the movement to build a better web!
Headings can be tricky to implement so I thought I’d pull together some quick tips on accessible headings. This isn’t a full explanation but rather a checklist to look at when you are building or testing web pages.
Tag: Headings
PDFs get a rough press when it comes to accessibility and understandably so as most PDFs on the web today are not accessible. I thought I’d turn the spotlight on the much maligned thorn in many a web site owners side, and look at some of the reasons why PDFs are inaccessible. What follows is a list of some of reasons behind why PDFs suck that are not about the technology itself but how we (the web designer, the content author, the content commissioner, the manager, the policy maker) use it and what we can do to start changing PDFs on the web.
Tag: PDF
We’ve been commissioning banner ads to place on other websites recently so I thought I’d share some of the guidelines we work to in-house when commissioning accessible advertising. It’s hard enough to know at the best of times how to deal with content on your site but when it comes to advertising, especially third party, what Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) apply and what should we be doing to make advertising accessible?
This article builds on Tips for creating accessible banner ads so if you’re looking for answers then read on. Read the whole article…
Firefox 3 has now been officially launched!
This is an exciting time in the browser area as support for the Web Accessibility Initiative - Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA) suite gathers pace in the next generation of browsers. Browsers with support, partial support and planned support for WAI-ARIA include Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3, Opera and Web Kit based browsers including Apple’s Safari.
We’ve got a series of articles planned for the blog that explore WAI-ARIA in more detail - watch this space for the first of those coming soon!
Firefox 3 will also be attempting to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours. Visit the Spread Firefox - Download Day 2008 site for more details on how to join in! By my reckoning, the download deadline for the UK will be 19:16 this evening so there are still a few hours left. You can read about the new features and visit the FAQ section on the site to get more information about Firefox 3.
You may want to check the compatibility of any Firefox add-ons that you currently have installed before upgrading. The best place to do this is at the official Firefox Add-ons website.
Further Reading:
Tag: News, User Agents, WAI-ARIA
We’re very excited to release a beta version of our Surf Right Toolbar. The Surf Right Toolbar is designed to make adjusting certain options within Internet Explorer quicker and easier, using either the mouse or keyboard. Developed by RNIB and the Web Accessibility Tools Consortium (WAT-C) the Accessibility Toolbar is a free download and currently in beta version. We’d love to hear what you think of it and any ideas for additions that you’d like to see by emailing us at webaccess@rnib.org.uk.
Download the Surf Right Toolbar (Beta)
The Surf Right Toolbar is really for anyone who wants to adjust the way they view content on the web to make it easier to read. This could include people with mild disabilities, the elderly, people with reading problems, cognitive problems, using dial-up, photosensitivity and so on.
Most of the functions that the Surf Right Toolbar offer are available via the Internet options tab in the browser however many people don’t always know that they exist or how to find them. What we wanted to do was group these into a toolbar giving easy access.
The toolbar is designed to make people’s surfing experience easier and give them more control over web content. Specific benefits include:
Download the Surf Right Toolbar (Beta) from the RNIB site.
The Surf Right Toolbar is still a work in progress or “beta” version. As such, we’re interested in receiving feedback on it including any bugs you may find during use. Please email any feedback you have to webaccess@rnib.org.uk with the subject “RNIB Accessibility Toolbar - Feedback”.
Full instructions on how to use the toolbar, install and uninstall it are available on the Surf Right Toolbar help pages. If you’re looking for more information on how to browse the web then the following may be useful:
Tag: Access Technology, News
PDF’s are something that we all struggle to make accessible and can be problematic. While Adobe have done great work adding in features to support us making accessible PDF’s there is still a huge amount out there that are not accessible either because they are legacy PDF’s or an organisation’s processes do not support the creation of accessible PDF.
To help you in your efforts to make your PDF’s accessible, a requirement of WCAG, we are launching two new services:
Costs and timescales will vary according to the size and complexity of the PDF but we will endeavour to do what we can to fit with you. If you’re interested in booking one of the above services drop us an email at webaccess@rnib.org.uk, attaching the PDF(s) you need testing or fixing together with your timescales. We’ll then get back to you with a proposal and schedule the work.
